mb@ttidca.TTI.COM (Michael Bloom) (09/30/90)
In article <7370218@hpfcso.HP.COM> mjs@hpfcso.HP.COM (Marc Sabatella) writes: >The GNU license agreement pretty much forbids us from providing any reasonable >kind of support. If this is HP's official line, it's a cop-out. There is nothing in the agreement to prevent you from providing support. For example, Cygnus, Inc.'s sole product is support for software that fulls under the terms of the GNU license. And they get at least $100,000 smackers a pop! > In particular, we could not sell any of it (only give it >away), so it would be hard to fund the support. You can sell as many GNU products as you want. You just can't tell the buyer not to give it away. Is this so alien? You will have no trouble "funding the support" because: buyers like "one-stop" shopping. They will pay you recurring support fees because they bought the "whole package", software and hardware from you, and they will do so because they want support regardless of whether the object to be supported is the compiler you sold them, the OS you sold them, or the hardware you sold them. With the GNU software, you are even free to sell support for code you didn't sell them. If they got the compiler from someone else but got the OS from you, you can sock it to them twice - once for the annual cost of supporting the OS, and once again for the annual cost of supporting the compiler. If you chose to, that is. You might not want to support a version that you did not supply. Fortunately, there is nothing in the GNU license that requires you to support the GNU software, no matter where the customer got it from. Thus, you can choose to only sell support for the version purchased from you. So, the customer can get the compiler from anyone, but if he wants you to support the software, he has to PAY you for the software. Sure, he can give it away, but the recipient would be without support unless (or until) he paid you for support. Major chip makers (including motorola and intel) as well as computer manufacturers (including your own competitors) have committed to selling and supporting GNU CC. Do you think they have done this planning to go broke, or just might they have a business strategy in mind? >Actually, no one has really managed to make sense out of Stallman's copyleft >from a legal standpoint; we are forced to assume the most restrictive >interpretation. In fact, there do happen to be people who can read english and the other languages that the copyleft has been translated to (by translators who were able to make sense out of it in multiple languages, no less). Perhaps you should rephrase that as: "we are forced (by the desire to fall behind our competitors) to interpret the document instead of reading it." >That, plus we have a significant investment in our products, and many customers >have an investment in some of our value added features like FPA support, >Fortran, etc. At best we would have to support both our own products and >Gnu's, and we don't have the resources for that. Well, guess whose products I'm going to buy? Michael Bloom mb@ttidca.tti.com "The views represented above are my own, and I make no claim as to the compatibility of these views with those of my employer"
shankar@hpclscu.HP.COM (Shankar Unni) (10/02/90)
> > That, plus we have a significant investment in our products, and many customers > > have an investment in some of our value added features like FPA support, > > Fortran, etc. [ ... ] > > that, and paranoid lawyers are probably the real reason... > > > actually, it really surprises me that HP doesnt distribute gnu > products. the have given the FSF quite a few computers and a fair > amount of money. it is obvious that hp people in fairly high places > know about the FSF and support it. Yes, we fund some FSF activity to port Gnu stuff to HP-UX. In fact, they (the ports) are freely available from public sources: it's just that we (HP) don't distribute it directly. Some groups within HP are looking into making contributed software like this available for customers without support, but I have no idea what the status of that initiative is today.. Also, to re-iterate a point made about gdb and C++: the HP C++ product comes with an enhanced xdb (xdb++, soon to be folded back into the regular xdb), that understands C++ *very well*. It's probably the most sophisticated C++ debugger around on Unix, even if I say it myself. ----- Shankar Unni E-Mail: Hewlett-Packard California Language Lab. Internet: shankar@hpda.hp.com Phone : (408) 447-5797 UUCP: ...!hplabs!hpda!shankar DISCLAIMER: This response does not represent the official position of, or statement by, the Hewlett-Packard Company. The above data is provided for informational purposes only. It is supplied without warranty of any kind.
jinx@zurich.ai.mit.edu (Guillermo J. Rozas) (10/03/90)
Also, to re-iterate a point made about gdb and C++: the HP C++ product
comes with an enhanced xdb (xdb++, soon to be folded back into the regular
xdb), that understands C++ *very well*. It's probably the most
sophisticated C++ debugger around on Unix, even if I say it myself.
You (and apparently the rest of HP) don't get the point. It is not a
matter of which debugger is better, but which debugger individual
users prefer. I may agree with you that xdb is better than gdb (I do
not), but I have to develop and occasionally support code on HPs,
Suns, Vaxen, etc., and I don't want to have to learn 3 or more
different debuggers. I want to use gdb because it runs on all of
them, and because it allows me to debug the code that I will actually
be running (compiled with -O). I don't want to force this choice on
other users, but telling me that the HP-supplied utilities are better
or work well doesn't help me in the least.
I just wish that HP would support stab directives so that HP's as and
ld (rather than gas and gld with Berkely executable format) could be
used instead. A somewhat less desirable alternative would be to
document the debugging directives that cdb/xdb uses so that a more
natural port of gcc/gdb could be done.